The Dungeon Fairy: Two Choices: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 2) Jonathan Brooks (online e reader TXT) 📖

a perfect sphere around her Core Room and defensive room where her traps and enchanted armor creatures had been.  At some point, the sheer destructiveness of the explosion had faded enough that it didn’t consume her entire dungeon, just anything within 100 feet of its epicenter.

Her mind flowed through the tunnel to find her Boss Room untouched, and as she quickly flowed through the adjacent room she found them just the way she left them – except that all of the Environmental Objects, including rock, dirt, and trees, were completely gone.  Not only that, but the Rotating Stone Bridges that she had placed to act as a way to open and close tunnels were missing, having disappeared when she was no longer “connected” to the dungeon as a whole.  This also meant that the exit staircase going up to the surface was open, though that didn’t really matter at that point, since no one was inside of her dungeon.

No one alive, at least.  The only thing she found in her dungeon other than rooms made from stone were the desiccated and rotting corpses of 5 people in her third room down from the surface.  Thinking back, she remembered that the blue-skinned invaders had slaughtered the group of Raiders delving through her dungeon at the time; obviously, no one had come back to retrieve the bodies.  She was also glad that there weren’t any others, as it probably meant that Sterge and Gwenda had probably made it out alive.

As she instinctively absorbed the bodies, she realized that all of her access to her Dungeon Force had returned!  Her Fairy Mana was also at her figurative fingertips, though both that and her DF were low; apparently, she had been empty of each resource and they were now regenerating.  Regenerating normally, and not like a brand-new Core or Dungeon Assistant.  A quick look at her Statuses showed that everything appeared to be exactly the same as it had been before she had…well, she wasn’t exactly sure what had happened to her.  Regardless, it was almost as if she had left and come back at the exact moment she had disappeared from the dungeon, because her countdown of 15 days was still in effect.

The only difference, however, was how many CIPs she had accumulated…which was far more than she remembered.

Core Improvement Point Awards

Type

Variable Conditions

Potential CIP

Current

Rooms Constructed

Size

1 – 50

0

Traps Installed

Complexity

1 – 20

0

Monsters Created

Levels

1 – 20

0

Rewards Placed

Valuation

1 – 50

0

Raider Presence

Time

1 – 5

258

Raider Deaths

Quality

100 – 10000

26600

26,000?!  What?  Why?  The only thing she could think of was that the six-armed invaders had counted as normal “Raiders” despite them being anything but the norm.  If she had to guess, 4 of the blue-skinned ones had been worth 5,000 CIPs and the purplish one was worth 6,000; the other 600 were from the singular death earlier in the month and the complete group wipe caused by those same invaders.  The realization that the monstrous people weren’t even worth the maximum amount of CIPs made her question whether or not it was accurate; she couldn’t imagine something even stronger passing through her dungeon.

“Tacca?  TACCA?  Are you there?”

Shale?  Is that you?  She had been alone with her thoughts for so long that she latched onto his voice like a lifeline.  I’m so glad that you made it out safely.  Where are you?

“Where have you been?  I couldn’t find you for months,” he responded, sounding a little distracted.  “Never mind that, we’ll be there in just a moment.”

We?  What are you talking about?

There was no answer, but she found out what he was talking about a few moments later when she felt him suddenly arrive very close to her senses; it was only as he arrived just outside of her entrance that she realized he had been quite a distance away.  If she had to guess, he had been at the DPRC.

In through her entrance flew Shale in the lead, followed by someone she recognized and immediately wanted to swat out of the air: Head Instructor Lapis.  While he hadn’t been the worst of her Instructors while at DAPS, he was certainly up there on the list of Fairies she despised.  What is he doing here?

Shale didn’t answer right away, but she was distracted by the arrival of another Fairy behind the Head Instructor.  She recognized him immediately from descriptions of the DPRC Leader back in school, though she had never seen Council Leader Malachite in person before.  He was somewhat of a legend, as he was reportedly the longest-living Dungeon Fairy currently in existence.  As the figurehead of the Council, Malachite was the only one there was public knowledge about, though even that public knowledge was fairly limited.

If the leader of the DPRC was there, then Tacca had to acknowledge that things were going from bad to worse.

“Tacca…I had to tell them everything.  They needed to know what had happened to you – as far as I knew, at least – and about those blue-skinned monsters that attacked you,” Shale told her finally, sounding apologetic in her mind.  She couldn’t blame him for revealing everything to the DPRC, especially when she had essentially “died” and was missing for so long.

I understand.  You did what you had to do.

“But there’s something else.  Apparently, you aren’t the only one to have been attacked; you and I are, however, the only ones that survived to tell the tale.  I got lucky, I think, but we still don’t know how you weren’t destroyed.”

I really wish I knew that, too.  Tacca had those theories about dimensions and the warping of space around her Core Room, but that still didn’t explain how she wasn’t shattered.  It also didn’t explain where the etchings around her Core came from, or why she was stuck